Get It Sold!

Need a house?

For those unaware, I've been going crazy since early March getting our house ready to sell. Unlike in Florida, where we didn't have to do jack squat for the house to sell in summer 2005, this time around we're making this place look like a museum, new paint all around, repairs, powerwashing, new landscaping, as much as we're willing to budget.

Since we can't currently guarantee we're going to make any money on the house, we can't go too nuts. No new appliances, no new flooring, carpeting, roof, etc. The most we're investing in is an exterior trim paint job.

But there's this show on HGTV called "Get It Sold" and we've been enjoying learning about these little low-cost tips to "stage" the house. One of the recommendations is that we remove personal pictures and replace those picture frames with more neutral artwork.

Dave and I had prided ourselves in our living room, filled with black-and-white 8 x 10 portraits of the family, with the only color picture being the full-sized family portrait over the fireplace. You can see what I'm talking about in this picture from Easter morning (yes, Dave's wearing bunny ears, what a trooper!):



We didn't want to run out to Bed Bath and Beyond or some art store to spend money on neutral stuff that we wouldn't even want to take to Nebraska.

Dave came up with the idea to make some 8 x 10 black and white prints of some of the less personal photography we might have on our computers. He and I spent the better part of an evening browsing our digital photo collection (about 19,000 pictures, going back to 2002) looking for something worth blowing up and hanging on our wall. Oh yeah, it has to look good in black and white!

After Dave campaigned (and lost) for a picture of a calf, and I campaigned (and lost) for a picture of Mount Washington, NH we settled on 5 very nice pictures, that we had Shutterfly blow up for us for a grand total of $20.02! I'm in the middle of re-framing the black and whites right now and it's looking very impressive.

The picture of the tall ship goes into our bedroom, while the other 4 pictures will be in the living room, in black "floating" frames.